Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The Pill And The Single Woman

Forget Megan McArdle. Kathryn Jean Lopez is talking about sex again, and I know where I want to be!

Raquel Welch has written a beauty guide/rehash of her personal failures, Raquel, Beyond The Cleavage. Evidently the 70-year-old former sex symbol is without a man, and therefore the sexual revolution was bad. Kathryn Jean leaps at the chance to get some personal affirmation from someone who's actually had sex.

In an article that coincided with her book’s launch, she wrote: “Margaret Sanger opened the first American family-planning clinic in 1916, and nothing would be the same again. Since then the growing proliferation of birth-control methods has had an awesome effect on both sexes and led to a sea change in moral values.”

Wow. Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood have been mainstreamed — and federally funded — to such an extent that it is only the most pro-life members of Congress who tend to question our relationship with Sanger’s group and her dangerous, delusionally permissive, and eugenic legacy.

Go, Raquel!

Further, what she writes knocks the glimmer off the rose of so-called “sexual freedom.” The concept, ushered in by the pill, she says, “has taken the caution and discernment out of choosing a sexual partner, which used to be the equivalent of choosing a life partner. Without a commitment, the trust and loyalty between couples of childbearing age is missing, and obviously leads to incidents of infidelity. No one seems immune.”

Know what else leads to infidelity? Marrying a rich guy fifteen years your junior. Evidently, according to internet gossip pages that keep crashing my browser and have probably given me viruses, Raquel is finished dating younger men because they cheat. But now that Welch's career of living off of her beauty and marrying four times to agents, publicists, directors and millionaire businessmen is nearly over, the Pill is the source of her problems and sex with more than one partner is unhealthy. Now that she's made a small fortune parlaying beauty contests into tv gigs and modeling jobs, then spending her peak years wearing little clothing in movies and on stage, then writing beauty books and selling wigs and jewelry, Welch is having second thoughts on the whole sex symbol business. Kathryn Jean Lopez says:

The feminist movement has a lot to answer for when it comes to the open and enthusiastic embrace it gave the contraceptive mentality, which interferes with a woman’s relationship with her own body, never mind her relationships with men. Of course, many of the women of the “sexual revolution” generation paid the price in their own lives — they found that their best fertility days were gone by the time they realized they wanted to be women, not women suppressing that which makes them most creative.

Welch and Matalin’s message stood in contrast to the spin that was predominant this Mother’s Day, which happened to be the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill, in an ironic twist of the calendar. Among the pile-on parade of pill celebrations was an item from the AFP newswire that read like a press release from the memberless group “Catholics for a Free Choice,” known more for being successful at getting press attention than for representing anyone or any principled “Catholic” position. The AFP dispatch from the pill PR agency betrayed its ignorant agenda by making stale jokes about “the rhythm method” — a term that has been, for decades, used by no one but critics of the Catholic Church. It also slammed the late Pope Paul VI for not prioritizing suggestions made by an advisory panel over the teachings of the Church when writing his searingly prescient 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which warned about, basically, everything Raquel Welch regrets in our oversexed culture.

Like this?

Or perhaps this?

It's just horrible what the Pill has done to oversexualize our culture. But you can't blame the Pill for one thing--sometimes even when you do everything right, like deny yourself a sex life, refuse to take contraceptives, and pray reallyreallyreally hard, you can still end up one of those sad career women with no children.

The feminist movement has a lot to answer for when it comes to the open and enthusiastic embrace it gave the contraceptive mentality, which interferes with a woman’s relationship with her own body, never mind her relationships with men. Of course, many of the women of the “sexual revolution” generation paid the price in their own lives — they found that their best fertility days were gone by the time they realized they wanted to be women, not women suppressing that which makes them most creative.

[snip]

I understand why many in the media worked overtime spinning the pill as a good for mankind this Mother’s Day. But the truth is that motherhood is at the heart of what it means to be a woman, and, for decades now, the pill has been trying to deny that reality. Mind you, you don’t have to have children to be in tune with that great gift to the world, but you do have to know it, acknowledge it, and not pop a pill the purpose of which is to treat fertility as if it were a disease rather than a tremendous power.

If feminism and the pill have ruined the women who take them and motherhood is at the heart of what it means to be a woman, why is this anti-feminist young lady not a mother?

Kathryn Jean Lopez is 34 and her eggs aren't getting any younger. She's a career woman letting her reproductive years pass her by, instead of finding, catching, and imprisoning marrying a man, the way God and nature intended. Every minute she spends on politics is one more minute that she is not devoting herself to her higher and, indeed, only calling in life, popping out as many little Catholics as she can before her health is ruined and she's too pooped to pop. Because overbearing children is a good thing.

To groups that have for decades insisted that they represent so-called “women’s issues” and women’s interests, the truth behind Raquel Welch’s comments must be a bitter pill. So keep preaching it, Raquel! It’s a more liberating message — about the nature of life and love and men and women — than the feminist revolution ever offered.

Sing it, Sister! Quit your job, which you wouldn't have without the feminist revolution, and start birthin' those babies. What are you waiting for? You should be home, supported by your parents and spending every waking moment wondering why men don't see past the outer surface and see the inner beauty. The good old days when a woman had no choice but to marry any man who would have her and all men held women who looked like Raquel Welch to be the ideal of womanhood are gone, but Lopez has a great deal of experience in ignoring reality. And the Enlightenment. Instead she's stuck in the post-Pill era, with money of her own that she has control over, a fulfilling job, and exciting adventures like cruising to Portugal where she saw the Pope with her best buds. Who would want that when they could have nothing but rejection instead?

But there's still hope for the littlest missionary. She's recently had a makeover and looks as cute as a bug in a rug.

8 comments:

-- Lopez: "...they found that their best fertility days were gone by the time they realized they wanted to be women, not women suppressing that which makes them most creative." I guess she's trying to be clever with the word creative when she should have used the word procreative. The idea that any woman would at her "most creative" by being pregnant is .. ah .. asinine and insulting. Women are a lot more than, you know, brood mares.

Prezackly, kwillow. Its not women who use contraceptives who don't get to be mothers. Most modern women use contraceptives *and* become mothers--they just get to choose how, when, and with whom.

And you have to love the typical indignation over the use of the phrase "rhythm method"--its as unfair as talking about how Catholics used to have to eat fish on fridays. Because, ok, they used to have to do that but at some point the rules changed so stop talking about old stuff, already.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is 34 and her eggs aren't getting any younger. She's a career woman letting her reproductive years pass her by, instead of finding, catching, and imprisoning marrying a man, the way God and nature intended.

This could make a chilling horror film. K-LO writes a local column, "Sex Advice From Celibates," and then a hunky, Galt-Reagan-Romney type walks by and sets her heart a flutter... She could be like Annie Wilkes in Misery, but without Kathy Bates' talent.

"Kathryn Jean leaps at the chance to get some personal affirmation from someone who's actually had sex."

Ouch.

One of your best posts ever, Susan. I think you have captured the essence of KJL and the projective hypocrisy of her life. Poor little chubby girl finally has something in common with Raquel Welch of all people. Too bad for Kathryn that what they have in common isn't looks, but something more interior. With Raquel, it's apparently "My beauty will carry me," a commodification of herself that seems to have led to much personal unhappiness. Kathryn, on another hand, comes down on feminism for its role in the sexual revolution, something that seems to have passed Kathryn by and left her, sadly, with no reason to use birth control, though plenty of reason to hate Margaret Sanger. I guess that’s because the Pope does. This, as you point out, while she enjoys the benefits of feminism and the sexual revolution—the non-fucking side of it anyway.

Thing is, there are plenty of guys, myself included, who have nothing against fat chicks per se and just enjoy a roll in the hay with a nice lady, no matter what size or shape (within limits, of course). So, again, too bad on Kathryn for passing that up. What's with the makeover anyway? I always thought she had some of that smoldering Latina needs-to-wash-the-hair thing goin' on, but this is different, like, Here’s my 1984 School Picture! So much for the smoldering Latina.